I’m very excited because one of my favourite pieces of work, ‘Fry Up’, is due to be displayed as part of the Broderer’s Exhibition at the Bankside Gallery in London next week. The exhibition is taking place between 25th February – 2nd March, so if you are in London in that week please go along to the gallery and take a look. All the works are beautiful and to see so much embroidery all hanging together I think will be amazing.
Even more exciting is that my work has been shortlisted for the Viewer’s Choice award! I’m so honoured to be put on this list and I’ve got my fingers crossed that I might win, although there is some very stiff competition. Voting is done online, so if you would like to vote for ‘Fry Up’ you can do so here and I would be so grateful.
‘Fry Up’ is a piece that was put together over several months. It wasn’t originally going to be a full English breakfast. I started by making the fried egg because I had finished all my other projects and wasn’t sure what to make next. Once that was finished I thought it would be fun to make some bacon to go with it, and then it just developed from there. I kept making more and more components, and lots of people had lots of different ideas about what should go on a perfect fry up. In the end I decided I’d better make a plate for it all to sit on, which actually turned out to be the trickiest component of all!
I usually mount my work on a plain background, but I wanted to give this piece more context as I felt like it told a story so I decided to put it on the gingham fabric to give it a café vibe.
In total ‘Fry Up’ took 124 hours to make and I had a lot of fun figuring out how to make each of the components 3D. The baked beans were a particularly challenging component and I decided that fabric and thread wouldn’t do them justice. Instead I handmade the beans as beads made from polymer clay. After stitching them onto the plate I then used resin to create the bean juice. I did a couple of tests so I knew how the resin would interact with the cloth, but I was still so nervous about pouring resin all over my work, especially when it had taken so long to produce, in case I completely ruined it!
If you like ‘Fry Up’, please do vote for it for the Viewer’s Choice award, it would mean so much to me. http://broderers-exhibition.co.uk/viewers-choice-award-2025